Jack White

Jack White is the founder of Third Man Hardware and the lead singer of the White Stripes¹. As a guitarist he has moved from a famously small board to a large touring rig, and in parallel he has become a pedal designer in his own right, partnering with established makers through his Third Man Hardware brand to build signature effects². His collaborations span MXR, JHS Pedals, Donner, CopperSound Pedals, Eventide, Black Mountain and the French maker Anasounds²³.

His approach to signature gear is deliberately not about selling his own tone. As he told Reverb:

Instead, he describes being on the design team as the thing that changed his relationship with pedals:

Jack White and Third Man Hardware

Third Man Hardware is Jack White's own pedal brand, and its catalog is built on collaborations with other makers rather than in-house circuits³. Guitar World's reviewer described the model as White "partnering with select brands like Donner, Fender, and MXR to create musical gear aligned with his eclectic vision"².

The collaborations to date:

Several of these came directly out of White's own habits. He has long favored PT2399-based delays and is described by Guitar Pedal X as "a big advocate of the Donner Yellow Fall mini," a love that carried over into the Triple Threat, which includes that delay¹⁴¹⁵. The Troika delay came about because White loves using delay pedals on his voice, a process that can cause noise, volume drops and loss of clarity, so he brought the idea to JHS and opted for sliders styled like a mini mixing console for real-time control on stage¹⁰¹⁶. He confirmed using a Troika prototype extensively on his album No Name, calling it "a pedal that's never existed before, no doubt about it"¹⁷.

The Triple Threat has its own origin story: White approached Donner hoping to make an affordable pedal for beginning musicians, having been impressed with the sound and tone of Donner's Alpha series¹⁸. Guitar Pedal X reported his stated desire to see young and fledgling players get better kit for less money¹⁹. Notably, none of the Triple Threat's individual effects are based on pedals White normally uses on his board, albums or live gigs¹⁹, though he said "The Triple Threat will fit very comfortably on my pedalboard"¹⁸, and he praised the three effects for their performance and durability¹. He also joked that the pedal suits various genres and styles of music, except opera¹.

The Knife Drop, his collaboration with Eventide, combines octave fuzz with a monophonic analog synth for what Guitar Pedal X called "Giallo-inspired, soundtrack-like tones"⁹. Its factory presets, named Knife Drop, Dub Drop, Chainsaw, Hard Bounce and Obsidian, were crafted by White himself²⁰²¹, and its reduced three-knob interface was, in Guitar Pedal X's words, "presumably as specified by Jack"⁹.

His pedalboards

When The White Stripes broke through in the early 2000s, White's board was, in Guitar.com's words, "pretty humble": a Big Muff, an MXR Micro Amp, a DigiTech Whammy and a POG¹⁸. He has used the Micro Amp as far back as the White Stripes, and for a decade or more he has split his guitar's signal to two different amplifiers⁴.

His Fear of the Dawn touring pedalboard, which GuitarPlayer covered in June 2022, was co-designed by guitar tech Dan Mancini and built on a two-level, aircraft-grade aluminum Third Man Holeyboard⁵. That board included a Demeter TRM-1 Tremulator, an Electro-Harmonix Bassballs, a Honda Sound Works Fab Delay from Japan, a rare 1980s-era Russian-made Spektr-2 Fuzz-Wah (later replaced by a Dunlop 535Q wah) and an ISP Technologies Deci-Mate noise gate⁵.

By October 2024, around the release of his sixth solo album No Name (given a full digital release on August 2, 2024 after secret unmarked vinyls were distributed to Third Man customers²²), Premier Guitar's rig rundown with Dan Mancini listed White's stomp setup from nose to tail²²:

• Boss TU-3W tuner
• Radial BigShot ABY
• Dunlop Cry Baby
• DigiTech Whammy
• MXR x Third Man Hardware Double Down
• Rehoused Electro-Harmonix Big Muff
• Donner x Third Man Hardware Triple Threat
• Rehoused Klon Centaur
• ISP Technologies Deci-Mate
• CopperSound Pedals Triplegraph
• Anasounds La Grotte
• Eventide Knife Drop
• Union Tube & Transistor Bumble Buzz
• Third Man Records x Mantic Flex
• Third Man Records x Gamechanger Audio Plasma Coil

The rundown noted a few prototype and unreleased boxes that Mancini skipped over²². The board shows how many of White's own Third Man Hardware designs have displaced or joined the classics: the Double Down, Triple Threat, Triplegraph, La Grotte, Knife Drop and Bumble Buzz all sit alongside the Big Muff and the Cry Baby²².

Tremolo Probe and Woolly Mammoth

ZVEX Effects' artist page states plainly that "Jack White uses a Tremolo Probe and a Woolly Mammoth"²³. The Woolly Mammoth is a ZVEX fuzz pedal, and the Tremolo Probe a ZVEX tremolo with an unusual control surface: Analog Man's product page describes a 3-5/8" square copper plate mounted on a chunk of 3/8" clear acrylic that passes over the top of the pedal housing, with a 3 5/8" by 7" sheet of aluminum underneath providing shielding from ground effects and wires under the stage²⁴. The copper plate is the interface: the player's touch controls the effect.

White's fuzz history runs wider than the Mammoth. The Big Muff has been a constant, from the early White Stripes board¹⁸ to the rehoused unit on his 2024 board²². In 2013, Union Tube & Transistor made a pedal for White to use while recording "I'm Shakin'"¹³, and that design became the Bumble Buzz, which White demonstrated in the announcement video playing a Fender Bass VI on "Bread and Water"²⁵. Anasounds even cites "a Jack White-like gated fuzz" as one of the sounds its Feed Me MK3 can produce, using the Crack and Smash controls for a velcro texture²⁶.

For the La Grotte reverb, White deliberately kept fuzz out of the picture: Anasounds says he "wanted a nice clean or crunchy sound, leaving it to other pedals or amps to create his trademark fuzz"²⁷. BOSS's own editorial on pitch-shifting notes that White, in The White Stripes, "combined octave and fuzz effects to merge bass and guitar tones into one explosive sound"²⁸, which is part of why octave pedals like the Whammy, the POG, the Double Down and the Triplegraph have stayed on his boards across two decades¹⁸²².

La Grotte: a signature spring reverb with Anasounds

La Grotte is an analog spring reverb pedal designed by the French maker Anasounds in collaboration with Jack White, described by Anasounds as delivering "a warm, typical vintage sound"³. It grew out of a genuine purchase: back in 2021 White bought an Anasounds Element, the French-made spring reverb that got big in America, and used it in his studio and on his pedalboard²⁷²⁹. After playing the Element, he got in touch to design a spring reverb for Third Man Hardware³.

The Element is a two-part design: a preamp pedal hooked into an external Anasounds spring tank offered in three sizes². White wanted something different. Anasounds says he wanted an Element reverb whose spring would be integrated directly into the main pedal body, with slightly different settings²⁹. Guitar.com's reviewer put it as scratching "a long-time itch for Jack White: the ability to have a compact fully mechanical spring reverb pedal on his pedalboard, that he could use with any amp he happened to feel like using that day"¹². White himself framed it as a longer quest:

Three springs in one box

What makes La Grotte distinct is its tank: instead of one long spring, which similar reverb pedals usually require, three shorter springs are used, making the pedal more pedalboard-friendly³⁰. White says the third spring was the turning point:

The pedal is mono, unlike the stereo pedals some players prefer³². Anasounds' manual notes that the internal settings as shipped are Jack White's favorites³³, and that the preamp was fine-tuned by White in the studio, with an internal trimpot to crank or dial down the gain for greater flexibility³⁰. The manual also carries a practical warning: make sure you use mono jacks to connect the pedal, so the circuit can be powered³³.

La Grotte invites physical interaction. Guitar.com's reviewer noted "It even does the thing where the springs jangle in the tank when you give the pedal itself a whack," thanks to a kick pad that makes the springs jangle, even with the pedal bypassed¹². His verdict on the pedal as a whole:

The pedal is available in two finish options, both black and yellow, plus a limited edition swirl finish exclusive to Third Man Records that costs an extra $50¹². Anasounds reports some 9500 hours of production for the first thousand pedals, with more than 200 components needed to build each one²⁹. The pedal was approved by White himself and the whole Third Man Hardware team before release²⁹, and it now sits on his touring board alongside the rest of his signature line²².

For players weighing a spring reverb, the comparison that matters is with the two-part Element it evolved from: same maker, same spring concept, but La Grotte folds the tank into the enclosure and tunes the settings to White's preferences²⁹³³. Whether that suits a given board depends on the same trade-off it did for White: a real mechanical tank at your feet, in a box small enough to carry¹².

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